gotten and they showed her readily enough. Only in little David Brown's eyes had she seen a hesitant acknowledgment of the panic she felt ... and felt it in his mind. That she felt his fear and did nothing about it was the main reason she drove herself so hard when the little boy disappeared two days later. Someone else might have justified it, might have said: Look, I had enough on my own plate without worrying about what was dished onto David Brown's. But she wasn't the sort of woman who could find any comfort in such loud defensiveness. She had felt the boy's low terror. Worse, she had felt his resignation - his sureness that nothing could stop events - that they would simply wind along their preordained course from bad to worse. And as if to prove him right, hey, presto! David was gone. And like the boy's grandfather, Ruth shouldered her share of the guilt.
At the town hall she turned and walked back to her house, keeping her face pleasant in spite of her drilling headache, in spite of her dismay. The thoughts swirled and rustled and danced.
(love you Ruth)
(we can wait Ruth)
(shhhh shhhh go to sleep)
(yes go to sleep and dream)
(dream of things dream of ways)
(to 'become' ways to 'become' ways to)
She went into her house and locked the door behind her and went upstairs and pressed her face into her pillow.
Dream of ways to 'become.'
Oh God she wished she knew exactly what that meant.
If you go you go if you stay you change.
She wished she knew because, whatever it meant, whether she wanted it or not, it was happening to her. No matter how much she resisted, she was also 'becoming.'
(yes Ruth yes)
(sleep ... dream ... think. 'become')
(yes Ruth yes)
These thoughts, rustling and alien, followed her down into sleep and then funneled away into darkness. She lay crosswise on the big bed, fully dressed, and slept deeply.
When she woke, her body was stiff but her mind felt clear and refreshed. Her headache had blown away like smoke. Her period, so oddly undignified and shameful after she had thought that was finally over for good, had stopped. For the first time in almost two weeks she felt herself. She would have a long cool shower and then set about getting to the bottom of this. If what it took was outside help, okay. If she had to spend a few days or a few weeks with people thinking she was off her rocker, so be it. She had spent her life building a reputation for sanity and trustworthiness. And what good would such a reputation be if it couldn't convince people to take you seriously when you sounded nuts?
As she began to take off her sleep-rumpled dress, her fingers suddenly froze on the buttons.
Her tongue had found an empty place in the line of her bottom teeth - there was a dull, distant pain there. Her eyes dropped to the coverlet of the bed. On it, where her head had been, she saw the tooth that had fallen out in the night. Suddenly nothing seemed simple anymore - nothing at all.
Ruth was aware that her headache had returned.
There was even hotter weather in store for Haven - in August there would be a week when temperatures would crack the hundred-degree mark every single day -but in the meantime, the July stretch of hot-and-muggy which ran from the twelfth through the nineteenth was more than enough for everyone in town, thank you very much.
The streets shimmered. The leaves on the trees hung limp and dusty. Sounds carried in the still air; Bobbi Anderson's old truck, now rebuilt into a digging machine, could be heard clearly in Haven Village five miles away for most of that eight-day hot spell. People knew something important was going on out there at the old Frank Garrick place - important for the whole town - but no one mentioned it out loud, any more than they mentioned the fact that it had driven Justin Hurd, Bobbi's nearest neighbor, quite mad. Justin was building things - it was part of his 'becoming' - but because he had gone crazy, some of the stuff he built was potentially dangerous. One of them was a thing that set up harmonic waves in the earth's crust - waves which could possibly trigger an earthquake big enough to tear the state wide open and send the eastern half sliding into the Atlantic.